Five Red Herrings To Cut Down Mighty Trees
by MerriWyllow
Summary: Four conversations that never happened, and one that might. Spoilers for Season Three. As usual, LittleMender egged me on.
1. Unspoken

**Disclaimer: **If wishes were horses, there'd be a lot more manure in my living room, and a lot less on television.

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><p>"Hey, Jane, wanna be my work husband?"<p>

"Of course, Lisbon. I'd be honored. And while we're at it, we can exclude every other viable relationship for each other outside of work and act as surrogate spouses after hours into the bargain!"

"Yeah, you can make yourself free of my body in seemingly harmless, non-sexual ways like pulling my hair and grabbing my wrist to check my watch, and I'll apologize all over the place for you when you behave in socially unacceptable ways. We can be more married than Ryan and Esposito on that show about the detective who has a novelist following her around like a love-sick puppy. It'll be just great!"

"I'd better start drinking a lot of tea, cuz I'll be marking territory around you like a tom cat in a forest full of female cougars."

"Say, do you think we can get the rest of the CBI to start a betting pool for how long it takes us to start making out in the box room upstairs?"

"No need, I started it myself."

"Split the take with me?"

"Naturally. How else would I be able to count on your timing for the win?"


	2. Tea for Two

"Lisbon, will you make me some tea? Please?"

"Refresh my memory, which one of your arms is broken? Oh, that's right, it's your left shoulder. How did that happen, again? What's that you say? You didn't listen to specific instructions not to confront the owner of that charter fishing boat. What a surprise. I should let you make your own tea."

"Have some compassion, woman. How was I to know he was hiding Boddy's widow in the galley? I knew he was innocent of the murder, but I had to stir up his righteous anger to flush out the real culprit. Which I did quite handily, I might add, in spite of all the pain I was in. Besides, I had confidence that you would floor him with a few quick blows."

"Yeah, you keep that up, Jane. Keep claiming you knew he didn't shoot the vic. in spite of all the times Boddy had drilled his hull and penetrated his partner, Busch's box for storing rods. Keep hoping I'll forget you telling me Fuchsofen would jump on his rival's misses every chance he got. See if I don't make your tea with distilled water and powdered milk from now on."

"Oh, that's low. Punish me if you have to, Lisbon, but why take it out on a poor, defenseless beverage?"


	3. Tweet Tweet Tweet

**_The Real Reason Jane Wanted to Replace Lisbon's Red Couch with a White One_  
><strong>

**A/N 1: **Post 3.4 "Red Carpet Treatment"**  
><strong>

**A/N 2: **Replicating something that remotely resembles a Twitter feed isn't as easy as one might expect. For instance, I can't for the life of me figure out how to get FFN to show an "at" sign. In case any reader has not had the pleasure of being assimilated into that collective, yes, it is a pain in the 'hinder parts that the most recent posts appear at the top of the page. If anybody knows of a way to change that, please PM me.

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><p><strong>W_Rigsby <strong>_Wayne Rigsby_

_JustForKicks, ChoBizness,_ It's awfully quiet in there, you think he's ok?

_1 minute ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**JustForKicks**_ Grace Van Pelt_

_W_Rigsby, ChoBizness, _Is he whimpering?

_4 minutes ago_

IIIII

**ChoBizness **_Kimball Cho_

_W_Rigsby, JustForKicks, _That had to hurt.

_4 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**RJ_Ripper **_Fear Tailor Gory  
><em>

Is popping popcorn.

_6 minutes ago_

IIIII**  
><strong>

**RJ_Ripper **_Fear Tailor Gory  
><em>

_T_Lisbon,_ The lighting for the security feed is so much better that way.

_7 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**RJ_Ripper **_Fear Tailor Gory  
><em>

_T_Lisbon,_ A favor, if you will, Agent? Stand one pace from the center of the couch, and turn slightly to the south-east while you work.

_7 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**RJ_Ripper **_Fear Tailor Gory  
><em>

_PJ_Kreskin_, I saw the show. Really? "Pocket rocket"? If you insist upon being deeply stupid, there's no help for you.

_8 minutes ago_

IIIII**  
><strong>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_RJ_Ripper,_ Are you really going to let someone like _T_Lisbon_ take away your favorite toy?

_11 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**RJ_Ripper **_Fear Tailor Gory  
><em>

_PJ_Kreskin,_ You must be desperate, but no, I really don't.

_14 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_RJ_Ripper,_ You have to help!

_19 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**M_Hightower **_Madeleine Hightower_

_PJ_Kreskin, _You seem to be doing fine on your own, just keep digging.

_20 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_M_Hightower, _Help me!

_26 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**W_Rigsby **_Wayne Rigsby_

_PJ_Kreskin_, Teach me how to light a candle with my mind, first.

_27 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**JustForKicks**_ Grace Van Pelt_

_PJ_Kreskin, _You called the boss "dynamite" on television. I'm on her side.

_27 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_JustForKicks, W_Rigsby,_ Help! I think Lisbon is serious this time!

_33 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_PJ_Kreskin,_ It'll absorb lots of blood without showing the stains.

_35 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_T_Lisbon,_ No. Yes. And why?

_38 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**ChoBizness **_Kimball Cho_

_PJ_Kreskin_, Yes.

_41 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_PJ_Kreskin,_ What do you think? Are you on my couch? I've changed my mind. Stay there.

_41 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_T_Lisbon, _Was it working? _ChoBizness_ Is sarcasm really the most helpful thing you can think of to do right now?

_44 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**ChoBizness **_Kimball Cho_

_PJ_Kreskin, _That'll end well.

_49 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_ChoBizness, _Yes, please. _PJ_Kreskin, _Are you trying to hypnotize me over Twitter?

_49 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_T_Lisbon_, Watching the waves flow in and out, in and out, in and out. Just breathe in and out and relax at the sea shore.

_53 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_T_Lisbon_, You don't really want to kill me. You would much rather relax at the sea shore. Isn't it nice, relaxing at the sea shore?

_54 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**ChoBizness **_Kimball Cho_

_T_Lisbon,_ Camel bowels? Nice one, Boss. I have a tarp in the trunk of my car. Do you want me to bring it in?

_55 minutes ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_PJ_Kreskin,_ You patronizing piece of camel bowels! If you are in my office when I come up there, they will never find your body.

_1 hour ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_T_Lisbon,_ No need for language, my dear.

_1 hour ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_PJ_Kreskin,_ More like humiliating me, and thanks for reminding me how many people saw you call me "cute as a button"! %#$ you!

_1 hour ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**PJ_Kreskin **_Patrick Jane_

_W_Rigsby, _I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. _T_Lisbon,_ What? I was complimenting you in front of millions of viewers.

_1 hour ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**T_Lisbon **_Teresa Lisbon_

_PJ_Kreskin, _Do you like your body parts the way they are? If you do, start running.

_1 hour ago_

IIIII_  
><em>

**W_Rigsby **_Wayne Rigsby_

_PJ_Kreskin,_ How did you do that with the candle?

_1 hour ago_


	4. Where You Live

**A/N: **And now for something completely different: Angst.

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><p>He was in his attic, sitting on the floor in a shadowed corner, away from the window. The early morning sky shone in too much light for his mood. She knocked on the metal door, then pulled it open and called his name wearily. Even she could not keep the exhaustion out of her voice after getting no sleep following one of the most stressful operations she had ever been on, wrapping up the case that kept him up at night. Walking in, she saw he was not on his makeshift bed, not out in the open. She called again, "Jane, I know you are up here. Come on, answer me. Where are you?"<p>

She searched carefully in all the dark, out of the way places, and located him. He looked at her, a dead, blank expression on his face, and said, "Leave me alone, Lisbon. You don't want to be here." He flinched away from her when she sat down next to him.

"I want to be here for you, Patrick."

"I don't want you, Teresa."

"Well, too bad. I'm here."

"Too bad, Patrick, you lost. You don't get Red John. Too bad, you can't have the one thing you were living for. Too bad, too bad."

"Jane, you're starting to sound kind of crazy. Come downstairs with me, let's get you out of here."

"I'm not going anywhere with you. I'm not going anywhere. I'm already there."

"That sounds... final. Are you thinking about suicide?"

"Thinking isn't what I'm doing."

"Look at me, Jane," she commanded, reaching out to pull his face toward her, to examine his eyes. "Did you take something?"

"No, too easy for you to stop. You took away my reason for living, and you will take my way out, if you get the chance. I thought he was my biggest enemy, but no, you are, Teresa Lisbon."

"Jane, Patrick, I'm not your enemy. I care about you. I'll help you get through this."

"You stole from me. Red John was mine and you took him away. You kept information from me. You lied. You had Hightower send me on a fool's errand, because you knew you couldn't sell it to me, so you could move in on him. And then you let someone else have him. You steal from your enemies. You steal from people you don't care about. Do not tell me you care about me seven hours after taking away my reason for surviving," he said, punctuating the last several words with venom. He stood up and kicked a wooden box on the floor next to where he had been sitting. "Take that too. I'll get another."

She opened the box to find a gun inside. Picking it up, she stood up as well. "Where did you get this?"

"Max Winters. He gave it to me. A 'thank you' gift."

"I care enough about you to keep you from becoming a murderer."

She paused, then continued, "You have to know we kept you out of the operation to protect you from that, and from getting killed yourself. We were trying to capture Red John so he could face real justice before the law, a trial with a judge and jury, convicted and sentenced to death. The end would be what you wanted. He had a gun, and shot three members of the SWAT team before he was taken down. Killing him was not the intent there. That was just how it worked out." She looked down at the gun, and said, "I think you are giving this to me because you want to live. I'm your friend, I want to help you do that."

"Think what you want. But you don't get to say you are a friend; you're a thief. You took what was mine. What can I take from you that is worth as much? Nothing. There is nothing that I can do to you that will do you as much harm as you have done me." He abruptly turned and walked out of the attic. She got up and followed him. She kept up with him all the way to the parking lot. As he walked toward his car, he said, "Stop following me, Lisbon."

"No, I'm staying with you."

"Last chance. Get away from me. Now." He halted ten feet from the Citroen. When she did not move away from him, he gripped her by the upper arms and pushed her toward the passenger side door. "You've made your choice, then. Get in." Still holding her right arm, he reached with his other hand to open the door, then into her back pocket to pull her cell phone out. Eyes wide, she complied. He went around to the driver's side and got in.

"Jane, where are we going?"

"No talking."

"You're scaring me."

"Too bad, Lisbon. You wanted to come. We are not talking now," he raised his voice. That he was angry enough to lose control of his tone of voice gave her more pause than his hands on her had done.

He started the car, pulled out of the parking lot, throwing Lisbon's phone out of his window three blocks from CBI headquarters at a stop light. She heard it crash to pieces on the pavement, and was about to protest when she saw him staring hard at her, reminding her of his command to silence. At another stop light half a mile from the office, he reached over, unbuckled her seat belt, flicked his eyes past her toward her door while they waited for the light to change, and said, "Go." But she buckled her seat belt again and stayed put.

He drove surface streets to I-5, heading south. Forty-five minutes into the drive, he turned on the radio, searching for something besides static to focus on. Twice when she opened her mouth to draw a deeper breath, he growled low, "Shut up." A little more than half an hour past Stockton, he pulled off into a rest area. Searching his pockets and the floorboards of the car, he came up with $7.89. Keeping enough for a bottle of pop for himself, he handed the remainder to her. "If you want to use that for the phone, go ahead. If you want to stay with me, be in the car when I leave. Twenty minutes."

Lisbon used the facilities. There was the smallest tremor in her hands as she surreptitiously removed the ammunition from her gun, and checked that there was none in the gun she had taken from Jane's attic. That had been worrying her since he had tried to get her out of the car back in Sacramento, but she had not wanted to draw his attention to the weapons. Getting a bottle of water and a Snickers bar from the vending machines, she returned to the car before Jane did. When he came, they both got back in the car. She noticed that his hands were shaking as he drank his pop. She broke her candy bar in half and wordlessly offered part of it to him. He took it without looking at her. Waves of rage and fear stopped his throat when he tried to swallow a bite. Laying his hands on top of the steering wheel, he leaned forward to rest his forehead on them. A few panicked breaths came and went before he could swallow again. "Don't let me hurt you, Teresa. I want to, so badly," he turned to her, meeting her eyes.

Her own tremor increased as she took in the naked storm of anger, pain, and abhorrence unmasked on his face. "Jane, I know you must be - "

"You can read my mind now? Can you see what I've been imagining doing to you?" he said, harshly. "The knife's under my seat, in a leather sheath. Take it."

Obeying, she leaned far into his side of the car, feeling around until she found it. His breaths became labored again, and he hit the steering wheel repeatedly with his left hand while she invaded his space. It took him several minutes to regulate his breathing again. When he had control of himself, he choked down the rest of the candy and said plaintively, "Why are you still sitting there?"

"I'm not letting you go until I know you are not going to do something foolish. I can read you well enough to know that you're trying to scare me off, but it isn't going to work. You are more of a threat to yourself than you are to me. You say you want to hurt me, but you know that whatever you do to me, you'll be sick with regret when it's done, and you've already got too much of that."

"I want to make you feel like this - stuck like a ghost tied to the place it died. All the ways I could think of to get my own back - the worst thing I can do is make you look at... make you sleep there."

"Jane, what are you talking about?"

"Where I live. Every minute of every day. I've never left. I was hoping to, after I killed Red John. Now I don't know how to leave. Misery loves company, Lisbon. And I'm going to make you live there, too."


	5. Long Time Passing

**A/N: **For posterity, this was written after the Season Three finale "Strawberries and Cream" was broadcast, and well before Season Four began. I expect to be Jossed, or Hellered as the case may be.

* * *

><p>Getting her daily infusion of sugar and caffeine at the Starbucks three blocks away from CBI headquarters, Agent Wesley of the Organized Crime Unit bumped into Erichs, the Senior Agent of the Holographic Crimes Unit. They found a table together, and sat for a few minutes, gossiping.<p>

"So, you hear Director Lisbon is retiring?" she asked.

"Yeah, any bets on who they've got tagged to take her place?" Ericks asked. He knew he was usually a bigger gossip than she was, but suspected Wesley of having better instincts for office politics.

"Everybody's saying they'll drag Cho up from the San Diego office, but I think they'll bring in someone else more in the AG's pocket."

"One of the custodians told me there's some Jane person used to work here, went to prison for manslaughter, getting paroled this month, and that it's no coincidence that Lisbon is leaving now. Said once upon a time everybody knew they were an item."

"Oh, Jane, eh? I guess that's why Lisbon never seemed to be involved with any men. But to look at her, you wouldn't think she was the type to pine away for a jail bird."


	6. Domus Hadeum

_**Domus Hadeum**_

**Author's note: **There were a few people who added this "Five Things" story to their story alerts. I have been hard at work writing a continuation for ch. 4 - the big, angsty, creepy one. It has turned into a monster of a fic. I will be posting it as a separate story, starting in a day or two, entitled "Domus Hadeum". In the meantime, have a teaser from the middle of what will be chapter two of of the monster.

**IIIIIIIIIII**

As she came into the room, he said, "I thought I told you to go to bed, Lisbon."

"I haven't had a bedtime in decades."

"You chose to come here. If you don't want to do what I tell you, leave. I'll call a cab, you can go to the airport, or find a hotel, whatever you want. If you stay, well, you stay on my terms. You don't have control here."

"That's what this is all about, isn't it, Jane? Control." She moderated her voice, keeping it neutral so she didn't reveal her precarious perch between wanting to give as good as she got, and mollifying him. "You couldn't control what happened to your family. But to make sense of the pain, you make believe it was your fault, because at least that makes you feel more powerful than accepting how helpless we humans are, as individuals, in the face of evil. You wanted to control Red John's end, so you could feel you had power over him, not because your wife and daughter would have wanted you to avenge their deaths. But you couldn't control what happened to Red John, so now you want to control what exactly? Don't answer that out loud, just think long and hard about the kind of dirty satisfaction you will get out of having that kind of power over me, what good it will really do for you. This is like something out of a Greek tragedy, only you're doing it ass-backwards - calamity happens and _then_ you grow your hubris to disastrous proportions."

"Enough talk - either do what I tell you or go."

She looked at him, held his eyes for several long moments then went back to the bedroom. She sat on the mattress with her back against the wall and waited to hear his footsteps approaching. She said a prayer out loud, timing it carefully so that he would hear part of it. "Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen"

Coming into the room, hearing the end of her prayer, he said, "No, you don't pray for them. Just lie down and go to sleep."

"You come here partly to punish yourself, and partly to be close to them, Jane. You can't give me the one without the other. Since I never met them, this is the only way I know to get close. I asked them to pray for you, earlier."

"Why are you making me repeat my instructions? I've told you what to do. Now do it."

"What goes around, comes around - think of all the times I gave you instructions that you completely ignored."

"Lie down, by the wall." She finally obeyed, and he lay down next to her.

She rolled onto her side, facing the wall. She put her hand on it, and whispered, "You can be at peace now. We caught your murderer. He isn't going to hurt anyone ever again. And somehow or the other, I'll help your Patrick to be at peace, too."

He shot his hand over her mouth. "That is enough. You aren't here to make friends. Go to sleep."

Grabbing his arm, she pulled his hand off her face. "Jane, I'm willing to put up with a lot from you right now, but if you put your hand over my mouth again, I will break your fingers. You. Do. Not. Do. That. To. Me. Ever again." He had only heard her use that voice with the worst of the worst. Masking the conflict between his urge to deny any line she might draw and his qualms against stripping the woman of all her barriers, he moved his hand off of her. He had not yet done any irreparable harm to her. And by virtue of her commitment to salvaging him, he had yet to do irreparable damage to their relationship. The rage in him wanted to know where those last lines were so he could savor crossing them deliberately. The last shreds of trust in him wanted to know where they were to help her defend them. It was a long time before either of them were calm enough for the weariness of the day to drag them under.


End file.
